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Griselda Blanco
Griselda Blanco is the main character of the Lifetime TV Movie Cocaine Godmother. Griselda Blanco was born in poverty in Cartagena, Colombia, on the country's north coast. She and her mother, Ana Lucía Restrepo, moved to Medellín when she was three years old. Upon arriving there she quickly adopted a criminal lifestyle and was forced into childhood prostitution by her own mother. Then at the age of 11 she commits her first murder to one of her clients after not paying her. Blanco ran away from home at the age of 16 and eventually comes to live to the US with her first husband Carlos Trujillo and three sons Dixon, Uber, and Osvaldo. She earns money by creating fake passports for cocaine smugglers, and moves into the smuggling trade herself with her lover Alberto Bravo when she realizes that using beautiful women as mules will lower the chances of them being caught. Griselda, fed up with her abusive marriage, leaves her husband and takes her children. She meets Carolina, an American woman with whom she begins a romance. Griselda soon gets remarried to Alberto Bravo but keeps Carolina as a companion for years. Griselda and Alberto established a sizable cocaine business and, after moving to Miami, Griselda's drug empire quickly grows. She comes up with the idea to put assassins on motorcycles as they'll be able to move around the city faster than with cars. She does business with Pablo Escobar back in Colombia, and becomes the queen of the cocaine trade. As a result, Miami sees a steep rise in crime and Griselda was involved in the drug-related violence known as the Miami Drug War or the Cocaine Cowboy Wars that plagued Miami in the late 1970s and early 1980s. This was a time when cocaine was trafficked more than marijuana. It was the lawless and corrupt atmosphere, primarily created by Blanco's operations, that led to the gangsters being dubbed the "Cocaine Cowboys" and their violent way of doing business as the "Miami drug war". Her distribution network, which spanned the United States, brought in US$80,000,000 per month. After knowing her husband infidelities, Griselda shoots him to death along with his lover. She than marries one of Pablo Escobar bodyguards, Darío Sepúlveda. Griselda and her family are pushed to the edge by the stress of their illegal business. Her three eldest sons have all become dangerous gangsters. Her marriage falls apart and Carolina dies of a drug overdose. Her fourth son Michael, fathered by Darío Sepúlveda, is kidnapped and taken to Colombia. When Griselda finds out Darío was the responsible of the kidnap she paid to have Sepúlveda assassinated in Colombia, and her son returned to her in Miami. Griselda herself develops an addiction to smoking cocaine that makes her increasingly irrational and unreliable. The DEA have been watching her operation for years. She moves to Los Angeles to lie low, but is eventually found and arrested along with her three sons while Michael is sent to live with a relative in Miami. Griselda serves limited jail time thanks to the loyalty she commands among her minions. After doing her time, she is deported back to Colombia where she lives a lonely existence after two of her sons were killed by assailants and the other one commits suicide before he can be killed. She dies an old woman when a motorcycle assassin shoots her on the street. The narrator concludes that Griselda "is now free."